


No Portents Yet to See

by Barkour



Series: that blessed arrangement [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Marriage of Convenience, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-15
Updated: 2019-02-15
Packaged: 2019-10-28 19:10:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,606
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17793098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Jester wasn't awake when Bren got home, but she was awake when he got to bed.





	No Portents Yet to See

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Valentine's Day! This exists in a sort of intermediary state. There are more serious, plotty, lengthy stories I want to write in this AU, but ah, well. When there's time.

She was asleep and dreaming of her mother’s hands cupped around a flower spun out of pink and blue candy floss, when something ran under her nose and she sneezed. Jester flailed in bed. She’d kicked half the blankets off over the course of the night. The rest of them went the same way, all to the floor.

The fire still smoldered in the bedroom’s hearth. By this little light she made out the cat looking coolly at her from the doorway. He’d run his tail under her nose. That was what made her squinch her lip up, her nose itchy.

“Frumpkin?”

The cat said, “Miaow,” and shook his head so the bell at his neck tinkled. 

Jester shook her head too. Sleep clung anyway. If Frumpkin was here and the bell was on again, then this meant…

She brightened as he stooped in the doorway to pick up Frumpkin. “Bren!”

“Ah, you weren’t supposed to wake her up,” said Bren to Frumpkin, who jumped from his arms to the bed, there to pace in a circle and settle against Jester’s knee.

“I was already up.”

“Little liar.”

“You have to come to bed now and tell me everything.” She held her arms out to him with her wrists lax and her fingers arched. 

Bren paused where he stood, just short of the dresser drawers they shared. What look he gave her, she could only just see. He’d turned his face half from her; now he turned it further. Without another word her husband began to undress.

“Fine, then you can be a sourpuss, I don’t care, you keep all your secrets from me, I am just your wonderful wife, Jester, who has been so lonely without you or _sweet, dear Frumpkin,_ yes, hell _o,_ your mama has missed you too.”

Frumpkin let her rub at his cheeks for a moment before he shoved a paw at her wrist and turned his back to her. Pouting, Jester sank back to the bed. Her tail flicked restlessly against the sheet. 

Bren was unbuttoning his shirt. He’d hung the coat downstairs, she wagered, on the same hook on the rack that he always hung that coat. A very silly man with very silly habits. It was too easy sometimes to slip something into his pocket.

“Well, then I will tell you what I did. On Monday I made bread but it didn’t turn out very good. I don’t know what I did wrong but Mama Becker, she’s the baker, you know, she gave me another loaf to take home. And on Tuesday I painted, oh, tomorrow I’ll show you! I painted that room downstairs, the stuffy one with all the old chairs in it. And on Wednesday I was tired of waiting for you so I decided to get a job, and I did.”

With his trousers to his knees, Bren looked sillier than ever. His red hair stuck out at all ends. He’d forgot to trim his beard while he was gone. 

“You got a job?”

Jester preened, in only her shortest nightshirt, her legs bare and sticking right out. The end of her tail curled in on itself.

“Yes, Mama Becker is teaching me how to bake bread! And she’s letting me use one of the little ovens she has in the back to make secret cakes and if they’re any good then she says she’ll let me sell them in her shop. And so-o-o-o-o, I’m going to earn my own money that I can spend however many ways I like.”

Bren hummed. He’d heard her, this hum said, and he was thinking about what she said. Standing then mostly nude he rummaged in the drawers for a clean undershirt.

“And of course because I will be working there then I’ll meet all sorts of interesting people and soon I will be the most popular person in the entire city. I won’t even have time for you. Oh, no! My poor husband.”

“Poor me,” said Bren dryly. He buttoned up the three lowest buttons of this shirt then at last, he went to her. 

First, though, he stopped to pick up the blankets and shake them out. He threw one blanket on top of her and then another, a third and the heaviest one, the feather-filled comforter, last, as Jester complained at each layer. She struggled out from under them to find that there he was: Bren, leaning in to kiss her nose.

“You smell,” she whispered, but she turned up her face so he might kiss her again. 

Obediently Bren kissed her left cheek; then as she presented it, he kissed her right cheek. 

“I wasn’t gone so long.”

“Longer this time,” said Jester. She wound her arms around him. “I didn’t think I would miss you so much. But…” 

She wanted to make him laugh, but she didn’t feel much like laughing. He had gone for the exact number of days he had said, and on the second day she had started to think of her mother, and of how very far away she was from her mother, and the strange looks people gave Jester if she went outside here. 

Bren touched her face. His fingertips were warm. His touch was too deliberate for comfort, too slight to linger. He mapped the coastal lines of her jaw with fingers and thumb. All the while he looked at her without blinking.

She said, “Ah, forget I said anything, okay? It isn’t important, you know,” and Bren brushed his mouth across hers.

Very lowly he said, “I missed you too. Jester,” and he bent to kiss her again, his lips forever too dry but his breath an excitement, and the scrape of his beard another enticement. 

Her heart beat loudly. She stroked his hair. When she reached for him, Bren was already there reaching for her. Jester understood why it was her mother liked sex so much. When Bren kissed Jester’s neck, and he shivered under her hands even as his hands burned at her back, Jester felt something of the divine on her.

They tangled together.

After, breathing heavily, sweat stickying his skin even as she cooled, she rested her chin on his shoulder. He tweaked a horn idly. Jester wrinkled her nose at him.

“Three weeks from now,” said Bren, slower, “I will have to leave again. A week this time. And another week the month after.”

“That’s okay. I don’t need you.” Jester flicked his nose. “But I do like you. I like you a whole lot.”

Bren smiled. His teeth flashed. He play-bit at her fingers. Jester laughed; it pealed in the room, like bells.

“Good,” said Bren. “I like you.” His eyes were dark. He said again, “I like you,” and there was some peculiar weight to the way he said it that made Jester squirm and feign offense. 

“That’s not very romantic. You have to say, ‘Jester, I love you! Jester, I can’t live without you!’ And then you collapse swooning into my arms.”

He hummed again and nodded. Wiggling again, Jester stretched beside him. Shyly, she reached to run her fingers across and through the wiry red hair of his chest and pale gut. 

“What do you do on these trips? No. Let me guess.”

“All right.” Bren caught her hand on his chest. His fingers wound with hers. “Tell me. What is it that I do for the empire?”

“You’re a traveling salesman,” said Jester. “No, don’t laugh! Hmmm, okay, a traveling preacher. No? That wasn’t it either?”

“You know it isn’t those things.”

“How dare you! I am guessing very seriously,” said Jester. She pretended to think, drumming her fingers alongside his. “You… are a traveling circus performer, only you don’t have the rest of the circus with you. Or maybe it’s something exciting, like, ooooh, you _catch spies_ and to catch them you have to pretend like you’re a spy too.”

Bren stroked her first finger with his thumb. He said, “Yes. You’ve caught me.”

Jester gasped and dropped her chin on his chest. “Do they make you wear a handsome suit?”

“And boots with very high heels,” said Bren.

“So you _are_ a circus performer,” said Jester, and Bren laughed. Really it was more of a chuckle than a laugh. “Don’t tell me. I’ll figure it out.”

“Well, once you figure it out, you let me know. That way I can tell my superiors that my cover is blown.”

“And we’ll have to go on the run.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” said Bren, wry and certain. 

“Don’t you think that would be fun?”

“I do not.”

“We could go on an adventure together,” Jester said. “You know, in Nicondaras, when people get married, they go on a honeymoon.”

“But usually not in exile.”

“Well,” said Jester, “aren’t I in exile? Kind of. That’s the entire reason why we had to get married in the first place is because otherwise—” She dropped her voice to be speak franker: “They would have to kill me.”

Bren held her hand at his chest. His thumb made another small motion over her finger. 

“Well,” he said. “It won’t come to that again.”

Jester eased against him. “Good,” she told him. “Because it isn’t very fashionable, maybe, but… I do really like you,” and he held her hand tightly and came up on his elbow so he could kiss her again, deeply this time and lingering so that when she did sleep again she did so happily. She didn’t have any dreams after that, or at least no dreams she remembered. Everything would be wonderful soon enough.


End file.
